Five Things Basketball Legend Nancy Lieberman Taught Me About Being Fearless

There are people you interview whose accomplishments are impressive. And then there are people who make you sit up a little straighter while you’re talking to them.

Nancy Lieberman did that to me.

Nancy is one of the great pioneers of women’s basketball: an Olympic medalist, a star of the earliest days of women’s professional basketball, the first woman to become head coach of a men’s professional basketball team – and today, still coaching men in the BIG3, the fast-paced three-on-three professional league Ice Cube founded in 2017.

But what stayed with me after our conversation on LIFT wasn’t the list of firsts. It was the way Nancy talks about fear.

She grew up poor in Queens, N.Y. Her parents divorced. There were times when there was no food, heat or electricity in the house. Basketball became an escape, and eventually, a kind of chosen family. As a 12-year-old girl, she would ride the subway from Far Rockaway to Rucker Park in Harlem looking for games with grown men.

This is a woman who learned very early that sometimes nobody is going to invite you onto the court.

You go anyway.

Here are five things I took away from my conversation with Nancy Lieberman this week on LIFT.

Nancy has spent much of her career walking into rooms where the default assumption was that the men belonged there. . .and she didn’t.

When she began coaching men, one player tried to test her basketball knowledge during practice. Nancy answered his question in detail. He stopped testing her.

Her lesson was simple: “If you have something important to say and you can back it up, then they’ll listen to you.”

Nancy didn’t spend her energy wondering whether the players liked having a woman coaching them. She demonstrated that she knew what she was doing.

That’s a useful distinction for anyone who’s ever been the only woman in the room.

Confidence isn’t convincing everybody that you deserve to be there. Sometimes it’s simply being prepared enough that the question becomes irrelevant.

This was the line that stopped me.

Nancy became close friends with Muhammad Ali when she was in her early 20s. Their friendship lasted 37 years, and she says Ali taught her something she has carried through her life: “I want you to respect everybody, but I want you to fear nobody.”

Nancy turned it into a mantra.

I AM NOT AFRAID.

Not afraid to play against men. Not afraid to coach men. Not afraid to change the world.

But there was another piece of Ali’s advice that I found even more interesting. Nancy says he taught her to love herself. Growing up without hearing “I love you,” she had learned to look elsewhere for validation. Ali helped her understand that money, possessions and achievement can fill that hole temporarily but they can’t do the deeper work.

I’ve been thinking about that. Fearlessness may not begin with believing you’re better than everyone else. It may begin with finally believing you’re enough.

When the WNBA launched, Nancy was 39 years old.

She had already had an extraordinary career. She had a two-year-old son. She had nothing left to prove.

She came back anyway.

Part of the reason was beautifully simple: she wanted her son TJ to know what his mother actually did. She remembers asking him what Mommy did for a living and eventually announcing: “Your mom is a baller.”

Then she went back to work. And when it came time to decide whether she deserved a roster spot, Nancy told the league’s personnel director: “Don’t worry about my name. Just look at my game.”

In other words: Don’t give me the job because I’m Nancy Lieberman. Give it to me if I can still do the job.

She trained. She prepared. She made the team. Years later, she returned again at 50.

There is something so LIFT about that.

Your résumé may get you onto the court. But you still have to play.

When Nancy played professionally at 50, Kobe Bryant asked her for 15 minutes.

He had questions.

What had she eaten? How had she trained? Was she nervous? Was she sore? What did she drink? What supplements did she take? What did it feel like?

Nancy remembers looking at Kobe, the reigning MVP and NBA champion, and thinking: You’re asking me?

But Kobe wanted to understand how a 50-year-old woman had prepared herself to compete professionally.

And years earlier, Pat Riley had watched her in much the same way. He later told Nancy that when he was an insecure young coach, he would think about how she walked into practice every day against men who were bigger, stronger and faster and behaved as though she belonged there.

She inspired these legends. That’s the thing about doing something difficult in public.

Somebody else may be watching you and learning what’s possible.

Nancy is 68 and still coaching. I asked her what she’s still chasing.

Her answer: the love of the game.

Then she told me a hilarious story involving her mother and Deion Sanders, NFL Hall of Famer and current college football coach. Sanders had talked about losing “the dog” in him, that competitive fire that had driven him.

Nancy’s mother misunderstood and thought Deion had literally lost his dog.

Nancy had to explain.

And then she gave me the line that may best explain her entire life: “I have not lost the dog in me.”

When Ice Cube invited Nancy to coach in the BIG3, she asked him point blank whether he was hiring her simply to check a diversity box.

No, he told her. He thought she could win. And then he told her something women still don’t hear often enough: She would be paid exactly what the male coaches were paid.

Nancy won the championship her first season.

There is a lot of talk about slowing down as we get older. Becoming reasonable. Adjusting our expectations.

Nancy Lieberman seems constitutionally uninterested in any of it.

She still wants to compete. She still wants to win.

She still has the dog in her.

Hear the full conversation with Nancy Lieberman on LIFT on SiriusXM and wherever you get your podcasts.